Glazed terracotta, circa 1990s. Approximately 558x330 mm; 22x13 inches.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Philadelphia (2020).
This large terracotta vessel and the following lot are early sculptures made by Simone Leigh in the 1990s. Simone Leigh's water pot sculptures reference traditional forms from Africa and the Diaspora. In a 2017 artist's statement, Leigh explained how she "came to [her] artistic practice via the study of philosophy, cultural studies, and a strong interest in African and African American art, which has imbued [her] object and performance-based work with a concern for the ethnographic, especially the way it records and describes objects." These robust vessels show how these interests were manifest in her sculpture 30 years ago.
This early period of Simone Leigh's life and career was chronicled recently by Calvin Tomkins in his March 21, 2022 profile "The Monumental Success of Simone Leigh" in The New Yorker. Tomkins describes the critical development of Leigh as a young artist. Leigh majored in visual art with a minor in philosophy at Earlham, a Quaker liberal art college in Richmond, Indiana. Tomkins retells the beginning of her work in ceramics in college under the guidance of her professor Michael Thiedeman, a well know potter, and how Leigh embraced the medium of clay. After a summer internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and earning her degree in 1990, she began her career as an artist in New York. Tompkins reveals how Leigh found a job working in a ceramics-supply store with a studio in the basement; "in the evenings she as able to continue working of the large terra-cotta water pots that she had been making at Earlham." Leigh's early practice was focused on these traditional forms. Leigh told Tomkins: "For ten years, I was obsessed with these water pots. It was a kind of a perfect form, and it was something women had been making all over the world for centuries, this anonymous labor of women". Despite struggling to get the attention of either the pottery or art world in the 1990s, Leigh continued this practice; revealing to Tomkins, "It's strange, because I had a kind of confidence that I was making important work."
Leigh's practice now spans sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice projects while centered on Black female subjectivity. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and she was the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth with her monumental sculpture Brick House, unveiled in 2019. Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 with her exhibition, Simone Leigh: Sovereignty. Her work The Milk of Dreams was also included in the Biennale's central exhibition for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant. Her first major retrospective Simone Leigh organized by the ICA Boston is presently on a national tour.
